"Tom Purdom-Research Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)bridge that crossed a ravine in the mountains. The other woman had died in a storm, Gutara's role in the
death had been discovered, and Gutara had been clawed and expelled. It was a minor coincidence in some ways but it was the kind of thing that fascinated both of us. Postri-Dem had realized he was looking at an alternative evolutionary history when he was still a child. I had realized it three weeks after we had started our conversations and I had reacted with the same na├пve, babbling excitement that had overtaken him all those years before. I have to confess, too, that the discovery had given both of us a more adolescent pleasure. It messed up one of the more plausible chains of logic our colleagues had produced. On Postri-Dem's world, theorists had assumed that any intelligent aliens they encountered would have to be herbivores. Carnivores, they had reasoned, were specialized creatures who depended on their size and their speed. On Earth -- with equally impeccable logic -- many human exobiologists had argued that any intelligent aliens we met would have to be predators. Carnivores, they had argued, lived by their wits. They had to outmaneuver their prey. It was an agreeable idea and I suspect it had influenced most of our responses when we had discovered an alien ship had orbited Mars. As far as we were concerned, a group of people just like us had entered the solar system, made no attempt to communicate with us, and hit a robot probe with a blast of static that had put it out of business an hour after it had reached Mars. Postri-Dem had been convinced his leaders were doing the wrong thing when they knocked out the probe. We were intelligent beings, after all. He had presented the Chosen Presider with a long document -- the equivalent of twenty thousand words in International English -- in which he listed all the evidence that indicated we could keep our violent proclivities to a minimum when we really tried. Harap-If even read it. I gather. Apparently she had more patience than most of the human politicians I've encountered. *** Jinny's library contains eleven books on evolution and paleoanthropology. In one of the books on two-screen layout. The first screen is dominated by a picture of naked proto-humans standing on the edge of a plain. Their hands hold pieces of chipped flint. They look across the grasslands at fat herbivores. A half-eaten carcass is surrounded by jackals who will have to be dispersed before the humans can grab their share. On Earth, the text explains, the evolution of intelligence had begun with a creature which had slipped into a way of life that revolved around hunting and scavenging. A weak, unimpressive animal had begun to rely on its brain -- on its ability to construct simple weapons and make predictions about the behavior of its prey. The hunters and gatherers with the best brains had tended to survive -- and the human species had become more and more dependent, generation after generation, on its ability to think. The second screen is illustrated with an artist's conception of the early ancestors of the ifli. The proto-ifli are naked, too. In the background there is a marsh. Some of them are widening a shallow ditch by scraping it with stones. Others are cutting thin saplings and bringing them to a pond, where a tangle of mud and wood is rising in the center. On Postri-Dem's world, the text argues, the blind forces of chance apparently descended on herbivores -- weak, unimpressive marsh creatures who had been crowded into the drier lands at the edge of their natural habitat. In the marshes, they had protected themselves from predators by building nests of mud and grass in the middle of ponds. In the borderlands, some of them responded to their plight by digging primitive canals and creating their own ponds. Like the ancestors of the first true humans, they created a way of life that favored individuals who used their brains. In their case, however, the survivors were individuals who could build. Jinny read that book over fourteen months ago. How Did We All Get Here? was, in fact, the text in which she first learned of the existence of the ifli. She feels she's been interested in the ifli for a long time, of course -- and she has, when you think of fourteen months as a percentage of nine years. She has read all the other books in her library that mention the ifli and she is now using her "Interlibrary Connection" |
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